Solidarity and change

I25

I think the first...guiding principle when you're talking about pathways to social change is that there's not any one that's better than the others and that you constantly need to be re-evaluating which one you're on at the time because...what works in one point in time might not work in another. But I think the number one way to do it is to really join forces and have solidarity amongst different environmental, social activists, human rights, all these groups...really need to have a strong sense of community and a strong sense of solidarity so that they can mobilize.

Managing dissent

I7

I think there's something to be said for keeping our internal struggles internal. Stephen Harper does that really well and that's not say again that we need to become authoritarian or hierarchical. It's just to say that if we're going to argue about whether we're libertarian or communist or something else we should not argue about that in the Chronicle Herald. We should not split our broader leftist movement apart publicly.

Possibilities today

I13

...what is possible today? What would it look like if the people won? On the one hand, I believe that Lenin was right, a revolution can't be sustained without a very highly organized and disciplined central group. This is the big dilemma. On the other hand, a highly trained and disciplined central group tends to want to perpetuate itself and you can't have one and you can't have the other.

Other worlds are possible

I5

The Zapatistas offered a vision that other worlds were still possible. That a radical struggle against global capitalism could be engaged in that people could come together in a spirit of affinity and solidarity and actually not try and just dominate and control each other with a singular blueprint of the world or what the world could be. And I found that all very inspiring. And the fact that it was communicated through parables, through myth, through allegory, through poetry, through symbolic demonstration as much as through an armed uprising I found really powerful.

Plugging into radical politics

I15

Discussion often degenerates very quickly and is not about trying to find...strategic solutions to problems but rather is about getting defensive and wanting to yell about why your strategy is the best and I don't want to engage in that kind of debate. I don't really have any time for it because I think that our strategy right now should be to be talking to people about what's fucked about the system that we live in….[How] are you going to plug people into radical political movements? We're at a point where there's not a lot to plug people into...that's meaningful, that's consistent, that's going to enact actual social change. What we need to be doing is building people’s understanding of why the system that we're living under is the root of the problems that we're facing.

Radical sympathies

I27

My perspective has been coming from a radical, egalitarian position. I know that there are many different points one can attack something [from], but the point is to draw the links between those things….So yeah, I have an anarchist-communist outlook, that doesn't mean I'm not sympathetic to other things and other perspectives.

Confronting structures of domination

I28

Organizing can be a space where actions can come out and thinking can be engaged...goal setting, and thinking, and...active critical analysis can happen because we don't live in a vacuum….[I’m interested in] the ability to translate...thoughts into the world we want to see…[through] the actions that we engage in, especially when they're explicitly aimed at challenging and confronting white supremacy, patriarchy, capitalism, other structures of domination.

The necessity of decolonization

I28

...I think Canada is a colonial state and the question is to what extent will First Nations ever have self-determination as long as Canada is a settler state? I guess never maybe….So does that mean I overthrow Canada?...I think we need to decolonize, I think we need to think through how we're colonizing by being here and...actively confronting that...in the same way when you’re part of a system of oppression. For example, gentrification, if you live in a low income neighbourhood because that's the only place you can afford but you recognize the fact that you’re also forcing people out who are on a...lower income, a different bracket of class...or of color, how do you oppose it? I don't know, burn down the condo?

Imperfect victories

I19

I was recently watching a video of people trying to block a deportation at an airport and I think that's a win…..We’re actually physically going to try and block you from deporting this person so that you actually cannot. I think that's a win and more of a win than a policy concession....The problem is that those kinds of wins are always so finite in time and they're not perfect, right? They're by no means perfect in that maybe not every form of domination is rejected in that moment but some form of it is and I think that's fairly rare.

Keeping socialist ideas alive

I23

You can't let socialist ideas die because we still have capitalism and capitalism is unsalvageable, corrupt, it's rotten, terrible, crisis-ridden system and should be changed.